Victorian dainties, Viking skivvies and a giant madder vat

Trains of thought can be dangerous, especially without the brake of alcohol. When you have internet access, a debit card and moderate insomnia, a train of thought can get pretty far from its point of origin and cross the border into action before you really notice what’s going on. My most recent majestically out-of-hand train of thought has blossomed into a project involving dozens of hours of work, a London-and-internet scavenger hunt, the military catering industry, some ferociously geeky historical research, volunteer Vikings and a huge, eructing vat of madder.

I had had it in mind for years to make myself some Victorian underwear. (Hell, who hasn’t?) My new sewing machine and the interweb made it possible at last to realize that dream, and now I sleep like a true princess (or, if you want, like a Sarah Waters heroine about to be corrupted) in linen and lace.

After I finished the chemise, however, I had a lot of yardage left over — about 10 yards, to be exact, of handkerchief linen. So, after my train of thought had been chugging idly along for a few days, I decided it might be fun to try on some Dark Ages kit. Don’t ask me how I arrived at this idea. It was late and I have broadband.

Despising the SCAdian approach (stitch up some stretch velvet, slap on some Leia buns and a circlet over your glasses and proclaim yourself Marchioness Eowyn of Thropshire), I did some heavy research, discovering to my surprise and delight that turning the clock back 1000 years would probably yield me an outfit whose comfort, warmth, fit and grace would make high-street fashion look like, well, bits of plastic stitched together by children. I decided to start from the skin out with two undertunics — the simple linen garment known by various names and worn almost universally next to the body. I made one with embroidery based on a 10th-century archaeological find, and one without.

On an impulse (I get a lot of those), I decided to dye undertunic #2 blue with indigo, which is quite authentic for the period, as the pigment is the same as that found in woad. Indigo dyeing is a fairly fiddly process (it involves keeping the vat alkaline, anaerobic and temperature-controlled, which at least sustained the Bloke’s interest), but highly rewarding, mostly for the magical moment when you lift the fabric from the dyevat greenish-yellow and watch the blue develop, Polaroid-style, as the pigment oxidizes. I was immediately hooked.

The Dark Ages were brighter than you think — probably brighter than modern-day London, at least in January. People enjoyed wearing as much color as they could afford — blues, pinks, greens, purples, browns, reds, oranges. The modest sorts dyed with native plants like weld (which yields a startlingly bright yellow); the better-off used labor- and land-intensive dyes like madder (red) and woad (blue), or imported dyestuffs like kermes. (A piece of trivia: history’s really insanely wealthy, such as the Roman emperors, wore clothing dyed with Tyrian purple, a pigment extracted from the crushed shells of the mollusc Murex. A synthetic substitute, the first aniline dye, was invented in the Victorian era, sparking the mauve craze. True Tyrian purple is still one of the world’s eye-wateringly costly luxury items, weighing in at £1734 a gram, or 144 times more expensive than gold.)

There’s a fair bit of sartorial overlap between Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Vikings, at least as far as foundation garments go. My undertunics will do equally well for both, depending on what I put on over them. I’m currently working on an wool overtunic, or cyrtel, suitable for a moderately well-off Saxon lady of the late 10th-early 11th century.

I bought white wool fabric on Goldhawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush (London’s fabric paradise) and decided to dye it myself using madder. How complicated could it be? Well… fairly. Most home dyers are knitters who work with dainty little hanks of wool, which can be easily mordanted and dyed in a stock pot on the kitchen stove. By comparison, I was dyeing a monstrous 4-lb. swath of wool 3 yds. long by 60″ wide. I needed a lot of dyestuff, a lot of mordant and a lot of room for my fabric to move freely in the dyebath. I ransacked my brain for weeks for a way to heat 20 gallons of water to a simmer, preferably in a stainless steel container, and found myself rummaging through the online equivalent of the attic of the catering industry for steam-jacketed kettles, monster stockpots, field kitchen setups and the like. All too expensive.

Hope dawned in the form of an article by British dyer and rug-weaver Nest Rubio chronicling her experiments with cold-water madder dyeing, a method that makes much more sense when you consider all the eras in history when fuel might have been scarce and time plentiful. In the end, I bought a £10 plastic garbage bin from the pound shop around the corner and resolved to work with that.

I prepared the mordant bath at ordinary domestic hot-water temperature (about 130°F, or 55°C), added alum at 25% the weight of fabric, dropped in the wet, scoured fabric and put the lid on. Then I went to the Bloke’s parents’ for Christmas and left it there to soak.

Twelve days later, I came home, removed and rinsed the fabric and prepared the madder dyebath. I did this outside. There was a lot of madder — nearly 4 lbs. of powder — and it flew everywhere, including into my mouth (like a true cowgirl, I wasn’t wearing any kind of mask). I don’t recommend eating madder, notwithstanding the robustness of Maturin’s rats. It tastes like stevia, the New Age Nutrasweet (*shudder*). I added about 12 gallons of water from the hot tap again.

I read that bran is supposed to absorb the yellow and brown tones in madder for a purer, bluer red, so I added 1 lb. of bran tied up in cheesecloth bags. It was Fresh and Wild’s best organic wheat organic bran, so it’s bound to ensure superior results. Madder loves calcium, and London water is hard water, so I thought I’d fare quite well, but it also loves alkalinity and my tap water has a pH of between 6-7 (I have litmus strips!), so I added some baking soda to raise the pH slightly.

The dyebath frothed. Evil, sinister froth:

It looked as though I’d made a Countess Bathory-style beauty bath.

Eighteen hours later, the wool had turned a deep, fast tomato-red. Apologies for the poor image quality.

At T+ 48 hours, I removed the lid of the vat to find the fabric had floated to the surface in a soggy mass and was full of gas pockets, presumably because the madder and bran had begun to ferment.

Progging it with the BS (that’s technical dyer jargon for Big Stick) yielded satisfying blurping.

The dyebath has turned thicker and more viscous. I tested the pH today and added the barest sprinkling of lye to return it to 8, but the fabric keeps floating to the top. I’ve put my great brain to work on a Macgyver for weighing it down to keep it immersed. A large, shallow and hideous glass fruit bowl belonging to my housemate would do splendidly, but I fear it would lead to tensions. I’d better not tell them about my plans for experiments in fulling, a weatherproofing treatment for wool traditionally involving clay, stale urine and trampling the fabric in the bath with bare feet.

My housemates are lovely people, God bless ‘em, but fearfully square. This is what comes of growing up in sivilized England, where everyone’s jammed together and it’s impossible to remain unaware for long of How Things Ought to be Done, rather than in redneck America, where people have the odd broad-mindedness of peasants and mostly leave you to simmer happily for years in your own eccentricity until you come up with a new religion, a militia, a world-changing invention, a doomsday device or a new dance craze. Fortunately, England has its fair share of weirdos, albeit many self-conscious, defensive weirdos, and if you don’t mind mingling with weirdos instead of lethargic 20-somethings in skinny jeans, you can have a cracking good time. For instance, if I wanted to wear my cyrtel out of doors, I’d have plenty of places to do it. Seriously… re-enactment! Grownups who spend their weekends doing what I spent my whole childhood doing, but with better clothes and weapons and more friends! I must send a postcard to my 11-year-old self.

From what I can make out, Nest Rubio’s wool samples took 7 days in the dyebath to get to the shade of deep garnet I’m trying to achieve. In the meantime, I’m making the Bloke a shirt. A nice, ordinary 21st-century linen shirt, with buttons and everything.